aquifer mind in the deluge

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting with a counselor, sketching my December and January-to-date. I was, in part, shaking my head about how much TIME it took… to be ill, to recuperate, to regain my energy. As I thought out loud about those three timeframes — those last two were indeed separate! — and started connecting back across these past school-terms, I saw it:

I operate like an aquifer. I can spend my water quickly — woohoo! — but once it’s gone, it takes plain old unmanaged time for me to replenish the reservoir. I mean, I can pull on it along and along, as enough trickles in to turn the tap on, but when there’s not much there, there’s just not much.

Which got me thinking about this post again.


I started it over the summer, while I was in the middle of Six-Week Greek. During the first three weeks, in fact, as we got a new block of roots, and/or endings, and/or beginnings every. single. day. in order to spit them back the following morning in a quiz.

I was a poor spitter. No saliva to speak of. No matter what amount of time I spent trying to pour stuff in-!

And as we reached the midpoint, I was working really hard to hold patience, to wait in my own persistence and diligence, even as I would look at a list of nouns and five minutes later pass most of them by as strangers. Panic seemed a reasonable choice under those circumstances… except I’ve lived with me long enough to remember that me, panicked, is even worse.

At the midpoint, our prof handed us an exam (not quiz) that not only asked all the memory-things,
but gave us a block of Koine Greek text to translate.

Which I did. Gracefully and smoothly. Including things like person, number, and tense… when my eyes had slid blankly off the same sorts of things two pages before.

I realized (as I retroactively filled a few blanks) that, while I’d been feeling as if everything was running right off,
along and along ‘everything’ was quietly sinking in.

I was standing in a flood-stage cloudbuster of information.
And as it does, info was working its way through the porous rock, pooling in the interior of my mind, ready to refresh the roots, to cause the bud to open out into a flower.

Even now, six months later, when I use my fancy software (oh Accordance, you rock) to check on a verse from the New Testament, I glance and think… Isn’t that a…?

I operate like an aquifer. I don’t hurry well, but I go down deep.
And under wise nurture, I can last a really long time.

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